The UN’s development chief has urged UK ministers to have a public debate about reversing the “brutal” cuts to the country’s aid budget made by the Conservative government.
Achim Steiner, the administrator of the UN Development Programme, told the Guardian he found it “a little bit sobering” that Labour had not yet promised to undo the squeeze imposed by Rishi Sunak. While chancellor, Sunak suspended the UK’s commitment to spend 0.7% of national income on overseas aid during the pandemic in 2021, citing budget pressures, switching instead to 0.5%.
Speaking in Davos at the annual gathering of global leaders in the Swiss Alps, Steiner said: “The UK cutbacks were brutal, and they nearly broke the neck of a number of our organisations in the UN, because you moved from being one of the principal core funders: you simply slashed.”
The UK chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has not set a date for restoring the 0.7% pledge, first introduced by the former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown, and made no mention of it in her maiden budget in October.
Steiner said he did not want to lecture the UK – but urged the government to discuss the way forward. “The British public were simply told ‘there is no cost to reducing our engagement globally’. I don’t think it’s being told the truth,” he said.
“The generosity of British people is one they demonstrated at an individual level, in crisis moments, time and again. So this argument, ‘oh, people don’t care about the rest of the world’. Well, I don’t buy it.”
Reeves has repeatedly stressing the importance of balancing the books, and some Labour strategists fear talking about overseas aid is unattractive to hard-pressed voters who want the government to focus on domestic concerns.
But Steiner said: “You can quickly agitate a domestic debate that we have to deal with the NHS and therefore we can’t help people somewhere else. That’s a trade-off that is not either inevitable, nor is it without consequence.”
The impact of cuts to the UK’s aid budget has been exacerbated by the fact that a growing share of it has been swallowed up by funding the refugee system inside the UK.
Asylum costs accounted for 28% of the aid budget in 2023 – up from just 6% in 2016. The government has committed to bringing these costs down, potentially freeing more resources for development, but no specific target has been set.
Steiner said he had spent much of his time at the World Economic Forum in Davos urging leaders of developed countries not to forget their poorer neighbours.
“It is not worthy of a G7 and an OECD economy in this age of disruption and stress that we are so inwardly focused that we are not even capable to bring up the OECD average [aid spending] to more than 0.32% of our GDP,” he said.
“We are debating right now increases in military budgets. We are making choices, and we should be open about those choices. So if you increase military budgets, why are we not able to also increase our international cooperation?”
The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office has been approached for comment.
